BETTING ON A HOBBY

BETTING ON A HOBBY; HIGH FLYING HORSEMAN

By STEVEN CRIST: Steven Crist, who covers horse racing for The Times, is the author of ''The Horse Traders.''

Published: May 3, 1987

He strode through the flower-draped paddock at Hialeah Park in Florida, an intense man in a navy blazer. A shock of silver-streaked hair spilled down his forehead; his craggy features were deeply tanned. As he stopped next to one of the horses being saddled for the afternoon's featured race, a woman nearby tugged at her husband's sleeve. ''Who's that?'' she asked. ''Henry de Kowalski,'' he replied. ''You know, the Polish guy who wins the Belmont Stakes every year. Everybody calls him Mr. Lucky.''

When the exchange was repeated to him later that day, Henryk R. de Kwiatkowski (pronounced de-kfee-at-KOFF-ski) laughed his booming laugh.

''That's fine,'' he said. ''Nobody calls me Mr. Lucky in the aircraft business, but at the races, let them call it luck.''

De Kwiatkowski hasn't done badly with aircraft - he claims to have brokered sales of more than $2 billion in used airplanes over the past 25 years.

His track record in the big-money world of thoroughbred racing and breeding has been more extraordinary. As owner of some of the sport's most acclaimed competitors, he has twice won the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel of racing's Triple Crown, and has also won dozens of other major races. It is in the breeding shed, however, that de Kwiatkowski has reaped the largest financial returns.

When shares in the 3-year-old colt Danzig were sold to form a breeding syndicate, de Kwiatkowski's $310,000 racer went on to become the sport's hottest sire with a current paper worth of $100 million. In another syndication, Conquistador Cielo, bought as a yearling for $150,000, was launched on a second career as a breeding stallion, valued at $36 million. From this base, de Kwiatkowski's band of stallions and broodmares seems likely to produce generations of champions.

His success in breeding is all the more remarkable because it has come during one of the most volatile decades in the history of the thoroughbred-breeding industry. Most of the other new players, many of whom have invested far more heavily and studied much harder than de Kwiatkowski, are still counting their losses. ************* At his Beekman Place duplex in Manhattan, de Kwiatkowski lounges in an armchair before a tall picture window overlooking the East River. He is surrounded by the studied trappings of the upper-crust horseman - trophies from his horses' victories, framed 19th-century racing and hunting scenes, commissioned oil paintings of his own champions.

Before and after a dinner served by a family retainer, de Kwiatkowski chases handfuls of red pistachio nuts with sips of vodka, spinning yarns of airplanes, horses and youthful adventures.

His life story is a sensational saga, as difficult to resist as it is to substantiate. Born sometime in the 1920's in Poznan, Poland, he says he fled from the Nazis, was incarcerated in a Siberian labor camp, escaped only to be torpedoed off the coast of Sierra Leone, and finally settled down to study aeronautical engineering at Cambridge University in England. After a stint as a European sales representative for Pratt & Whitney, Kwiatkowski (the ''de'' was added later) went into business for himself in 1962.

De Kwiatkowski grew rich by putting together major airlines that wanted to sell outdated, piston-engine aircraft with small start-up carriers in Latin America and the Middle East. His biggest deal came in 1975 when Trans World Airlines, strapped for cash, engaged him to sell nine of its 747 jets to the Government of Iran. That netted him a $20.1 million commission, then the largest on record for a single used-aircraft sale. The next year, when T.W.A.'s traffic increased and the carrier found itself short of seats, he reversed the process, selling several of the same planes back to T.W.A. - at a much higher price.

When de Kwiatkowski started out, he had little competition, but gradually new aircraft brokerages appeared, the banks jumped in, and airlines began selling their own used equipment. Today, he says, he has little brokering business.

As he tells it, de Kwiatkowski became involved in the horse business in 1976 on a visit to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the spa whose tony August racing meeting is a magnet for the world's most blue-blooded horses and horsemen. On the day before the annual yearling sales, he met a socialite and her husband who invited him to be their houseguest. The woman, he says, tried to convince him to buy an interest in the horses she was selling.

''The next day,'' de Kwiatkowski recalls, ''she took me to a cocktail party. I met the Phippses, the Mellons, all those wonderful American families in the horse business. Then this woman announces to them that I am her new partner, that we sealed the deal the night before after three bottles of vodka and a Polish ham.''

He pauses, to heighten the dramatic effect, and scowls. ''I don't like to be surprised and unprepared that way, and I did not like the remark about the Polish ham. It made me so mad that I went out and bought $2 million worth of horses - not hers.'' ************** De Kwiatkowski was entering the industry just as the balance was dramatically shifting between racing and breeding. The new era had begun with the 1973 syndication of Secretariat for $6 million, at that time the highest syndication price ever. The same year, the chestnut colt became racing's first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, and the value of his shares immediately doubled. (In a thoroughbred syndication, about 40 shares in a stallion are sold to investors. Each share entitles its owner to breed one mare to the stallion per year. The shares and their attendant breeding rights can be traded, like stock in a company; they rise and fall in value with the racetrack record of the stallion's offspring.) The expectations surrounding Secretariat's foals were so high that, in July 1976, the first group of yearlings went through the auction ring for as much as $1.5 million apiece, shattering all the old records. Prices continued to soar as investors from outside the racing establishment rushed in, changing the sport from an insular game dominated by aristocratic families like the Vanderbilts and Whitneys to a big business filled with eager new players and new money.